'Feminism is not finished'
After years of derision, feminism is finding its voice again, from grassroots protests to a flurry of books, websites and even a summer school. But will it lead to real change?
Kira Cochrane The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2010
If you want to gauge the energy in the current British feminist movement, you have to speak to the young campaigners. Alex Corwin has defined herself as a feminist since she started reading avidly about women's issues a few years ago, aged 19. It made her "SO ANGRY", she had to become an activist.
Corwin joined a local grassroots group – Sheffield Fems– and since then she has taken part in campaigns that run the gamut: local, international, political, cultural. She could recently be found in a high-street newsagent, armed with Post-it notes to stick on the half-clad women in men's magazines, inscribed with the words "What if she was your daughter?" Once a month she and the group set up a stall in their local shopping centre, campaigning on issues including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, and how climate change affects women worldwide. Last year the group helped organise a well-attended conference; in 2008, they ran a campaign to stop a branch of US restaurant chain Hooters (where lightly clothed women serve up the burgers) opening in Sheffield. They're also working on a Feminist Survival Guide, to answer questions including "Do you burn your bra?" and "What can I do about lads' mags?" If she could achieve one lasting change, what would it be? "A total overhaul of the way society sees women," she says.
She is exactly the type of feminist who Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune are celebrating in Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement. The book's title isn't supposed to suggest feminism ever went away – groups as disparate as Justice for Women, The Fawcett Society, Southall Black Sisters and Karma Nirvana have been working for women's rights for decades now. But when Redfern started feminist website The F Word, in 2001, she felt there was a general perception that young women weren't interested, and that the movement was therefore gasping its last. "People in the media kept saying that feminism was dead," says Redfern, "and deriding it year after year". As a young lecturer, Aune noticed the same problem in academia.she met plenty of young feminist students, "but a lot of older academic feminists didn't seem to believe it". The idea of the book, says Redfern, was to "try and present a snapshot of the movement, and bring it into the mainstream". The reader they had in mind, Aune continues, was "someone who's vaguely interested in gender issues, but hasn't had something that really makes the connections for them". Each chapter focuses on a different area of current feminist thought and action, including arguments around violence against women, equality in the home and workplace, and sexism in popular culture.
The book ends with the results of an extensive survey. Redfern and Aune aimed at feminist groups that was started in 2000. Initially they sent it to 50 organisations, but the long, complicated questionnaire was eventually passed around 80 to 100 groups. 1,265 newly committed, newly inspired feminist campaigners responded, and Aune says they could easily have tripled that number if necessary. Three-quarters of the respondents were under 35.
It's just one of many signs that we seem to be entering a new heyday for British feminism. Another is the sudden burst of British feminist publishing, after an extensive drought. Along with Redfern and Aune's book, the past 12 months has seen the publication of Ellie Levenson's The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism, Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman, Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, Sheila Rowbotham's Dreamers of a New Day, and Kat Banyard's The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Men and Women Today. There are more books in the pipeline – Caitlin Moran, the Times journalist, who won Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards is apparently hard at work on a book about the future of feminism, and the young feminist writer, Laurie Penny, has her own take coming out soon. And published next month in the UK, after achieving bestseller status and causing quite a stir in the US, is Half the Sky,: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by husband and wife Pulitzer-prizewinning journalists Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which reports on the plight of women in the developing world.
Walter has been speaking at events around the country, and says the feedback has been phenomenal. Her talk at the Brighton Festival completely sold out, in quite a big venue: "I think there's a real hunger to talk about feminism". The mood is very different, she says, to 10 years ago, when she published The New Feminism, and was met with a bruising response from many female journalists. "People are ready to debate this seriously again."
Kat Banyard agrees. Earlier this year she set up social networking website, UK Feminista, where local grassroots groups can meet, debate and build strong, supportive ties. Banyard, who is in her late 20s, has been running successful annual feminist conferences for the past six years and has also decided to run a UK Feminista summer school, taking place next weekend, where activists will learn how to campaign more effectively. She has been stunned by the response. "In the first 24 hours 100 people registered," she says, "and three days on we had a couple of hundred. I've never seen anything like it. I'm used to spending six to nine months building up that kind of attendance at feminist events."
When I ask what explains this surge of interest, Banyard says that significant triggers arise almost every week. "Over the last few months, we've had the actor Danny Dyer inciting readers [of Zoo magazine] to cut their ex's face, we've had news of padded bras for seven-year-olds, we've had an absence of women on the election campaign trail, the announcement of anonymity for rape defendants. With headline after headline we're seeing a continuing need for feminism. And with each new incident, people are getting involved."
The movement is well-represented across the country. Aune says she was surprised by the huge amount of activity in Scotland, and Banyard points out that new groups include the Belfast Feminist Network, Newcastle Feminist Book Group, Fawcett Essex group, and Cardiff Feminist Network. This last group was set up by Hannah Austin earlier this year – within a week, she says, there were around 300 members.
Suswati Basu, a 22-year-old who is currently studying Mandarin at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, embodies the movement's drive and excitement. She has been a feminist activist for four years now, in which time she has campaigned against student beauty pageants and been involved with the London Feminist Network's annual Reclaim the Night marches – large-scale protests against male violence, which started in the 1970s, died out in the 1990s, and were successfully revived in 2004. Basu has also taken part in protests with the activist group, Object, which many of the feminists I speak to describe as the most inspiring campaign around. Object has been challenging the sexual objectification of women since forming in 2003, and they scored their two biggest successes last year, securing changes in the laws surrounding lapdancing clubs and prostitution.
The young feminists who are spearheading this new activism clearly have enormous energy, ambition and idealism, and in many cases are doing brilliant work. But the question of where the movement goes next, of what its prime focus should be, remains to be answered.The current burst of feminist publishing is promising, but much of it repackages longstanding arguments. The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism is, as its title suggests, a lighthearted look at the topic; Reclaiming the F Word is a useful book for its expected audience - women discovering feminism for the first time - but doesn't set out to present unexpected new arguments. Dreamers of a New Day is a fascinating look at the women who were fighting for social justice in the late 19th and early 20th century, but its context is historical. Nina Power's book, One Dimensional Woman, lays claim to new ground but, at 20,000 words, is an opening gambit in a bigger battle.
There's a need for new thinking and more publishing then - as well as more focus.If, as Corwin suggests, the aim of today's activists is to completely change society, then questions remain about where to channel their energy. Should the focus be on getting more women into parliament? Getting more women out of prostitution? Does having more women at the top help all the women further down the ladder? Should activists focus on the sex industry, equal pay, violence against women, international issues – and if individuals and groups choose to tackle all of these, how much change can they achieve? If inequality between men and women is structural, a web of discrimination in which the dearth of women in politics intersects with the portrayal of women in pornography, which intersects with the tendency for women to be paid less than men, the depiction of women as obsessed with shoes, the likelihood that female plaintiffs will be disbelieved in rape cases, the attempts to undermine women's abortion rights; if the situation of women in Britain has an impact on women in France, the US, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, then which threads do we pull to make the most impact in bringing the whole web down?
"It feels as though there's so much interest," says Walter, "from so many different areas, that something positive has to happen, but whether it will, it's hard to know. "I'm heartened by the rise in activism," says Walter, "but the questions we'll all be asking ourselves over the next year are: how wide is this new wave? Will it touch people beyond the usual suspects? Will it galvanise energy more widely in the grassroots – bring in other classes, women of other backgrounds? And will it also touch women who have the power and influence to change things? I'm not saying that women aren't asking these questions. So it's not a criticism of what's going on, but it's the challenge. I feel that we're beginning to see more happening, but at the moment it's still quite focused in narrow areas. We need to see it spread".
Banyard is equally aware of the challenges. "At the moment, while feminist organising is growing and really exciting, it's quite disparate and unconnected," she says. UK Feminista is an attempt to address that issue. "For me, what's absolutely crucial," she continues, "is that we translate this excitement, this energy, into real gains for women's rights - because it's not an automatic translation. We need fundamental shifts in our culture, in our laws, in business practices. It's not a simple process. We're very much at the stage now of creating a mass base of people. What's crucial is that we then use that".
What's heartening is that feminism does seem to be reaching beyond the ivory towers of academe to a broad range of women. Redfern points out that there have recently been feminist articles in Elle and Company magazines, while Walter says she was surprised to see pieces debating the importance of feminism in The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph this year. Power says that, even just a year and a half ago, when she wrote One Dimensional Woman "the situation didn't seem remotely as optimistic, but so much has been happening, and there just seems to be a mainstream acceptance that feminism's still around, that it's not finished, it's not uncool, and it's not depressing. It suddenly has a contemporary sheen that makes it exciting, which wasn't really true in the 80s or 90s at all".
Shahida Choudhry, a 40-year-old mother, who lives in Birmingham and has worked in the domestic violence sector throughout her career, says that although a lot of her work "has been driven by feminism, it's only recently that I've started to frame it like that". In the past few years, she has been heavily involved with the Fawcett Society in Birmingham, and is also the founder of the locally based Women's Networking Hub, which brings grassroots women's organisations together with those who need their support. In January she held an event at a library in central Birmingham, "which I pulled together, on my own, in a couple of weeks". She was only expecting a handful of women "twenty at most, but three hundred turned up. It was mind blowing."
Choudry is also involved with the Million Women Rise marches – protests against violence against women – which have been taking place in London around International Women's Day for the past three years and are among the most successful of all the current feminist campaigns. An estimated 8,000 women turned out this year. "It was absolutely amazing," says Choudry, "the feeling of marching through the streets, shoulder to shoulder. It really shows that there are women who want to speak out".
UK Feminista summer school runs from 31 July to 1 August. For details, go to ukfeminista.org.uk
Kira Cochrane The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2010
If you want to gauge the energy in the current British feminist movement, you have to speak to the young campaigners. Alex Corwin has defined herself as a feminist since she started reading avidly about women's issues a few years ago, aged 19. It made her "SO ANGRY", she had to become an activist.
Corwin joined a local grassroots group – Sheffield Fems– and since then she has taken part in campaigns that run the gamut: local, international, political, cultural. She could recently be found in a high-street newsagent, armed with Post-it notes to stick on the half-clad women in men's magazines, inscribed with the words "What if she was your daughter?" Once a month she and the group set up a stall in their local shopping centre, campaigning on issues including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, and how climate change affects women worldwide. Last year the group helped organise a well-attended conference; in 2008, they ran a campaign to stop a branch of US restaurant chain Hooters (where lightly clothed women serve up the burgers) opening in Sheffield. They're also working on a Feminist Survival Guide, to answer questions including "Do you burn your bra?" and "What can I do about lads' mags?" If she could achieve one lasting change, what would it be? "A total overhaul of the way society sees women," she says.
She is exactly the type of feminist who Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune are celebrating in Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement. The book's title isn't supposed to suggest feminism ever went away – groups as disparate as Justice for Women, The Fawcett Society, Southall Black Sisters and Karma Nirvana have been working for women's rights for decades now. But when Redfern started feminist website The F Word, in 2001, she felt there was a general perception that young women weren't interested, and that the movement was therefore gasping its last. "People in the media kept saying that feminism was dead," says Redfern, "and deriding it year after year". As a young lecturer, Aune noticed the same problem in academia.she met plenty of young feminist students, "but a lot of older academic feminists didn't seem to believe it". The idea of the book, says Redfern, was to "try and present a snapshot of the movement, and bring it into the mainstream". The reader they had in mind, Aune continues, was "someone who's vaguely interested in gender issues, but hasn't had something that really makes the connections for them". Each chapter focuses on a different area of current feminist thought and action, including arguments around violence against women, equality in the home and workplace, and sexism in popular culture.
The book ends with the results of an extensive survey. Redfern and Aune aimed at feminist groups that was started in 2000. Initially they sent it to 50 organisations, but the long, complicated questionnaire was eventually passed around 80 to 100 groups. 1,265 newly committed, newly inspired feminist campaigners responded, and Aune says they could easily have tripled that number if necessary. Three-quarters of the respondents were under 35.
It's just one of many signs that we seem to be entering a new heyday for British feminism. Another is the sudden burst of British feminist publishing, after an extensive drought. Along with Redfern and Aune's book, the past 12 months has seen the publication of Ellie Levenson's The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism, Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman, Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, Sheila Rowbotham's Dreamers of a New Day, and Kat Banyard's The Equality Illusion: The Truth About Men and Women Today. There are more books in the pipeline – Caitlin Moran, the Times journalist, who won Columnist of the Year at the British Press Awards is apparently hard at work on a book about the future of feminism, and the young feminist writer, Laurie Penny, has her own take coming out soon. And published next month in the UK, after achieving bestseller status and causing quite a stir in the US, is Half the Sky,: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by husband and wife Pulitzer-prizewinning journalists Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, which reports on the plight of women in the developing world.
Walter has been speaking at events around the country, and says the feedback has been phenomenal. Her talk at the Brighton Festival completely sold out, in quite a big venue: "I think there's a real hunger to talk about feminism". The mood is very different, she says, to 10 years ago, when she published The New Feminism, and was met with a bruising response from many female journalists. "People are ready to debate this seriously again."
Kat Banyard agrees. Earlier this year she set up social networking website, UK Feminista, where local grassroots groups can meet, debate and build strong, supportive ties. Banyard, who is in her late 20s, has been running successful annual feminist conferences for the past six years and has also decided to run a UK Feminista summer school, taking place next weekend, where activists will learn how to campaign more effectively. She has been stunned by the response. "In the first 24 hours 100 people registered," she says, "and three days on we had a couple of hundred. I've never seen anything like it. I'm used to spending six to nine months building up that kind of attendance at feminist events."
When I ask what explains this surge of interest, Banyard says that significant triggers arise almost every week. "Over the last few months, we've had the actor Danny Dyer inciting readers [of Zoo magazine] to cut their ex's face, we've had news of padded bras for seven-year-olds, we've had an absence of women on the election campaign trail, the announcement of anonymity for rape defendants. With headline after headline we're seeing a continuing need for feminism. And with each new incident, people are getting involved."
The movement is well-represented across the country. Aune says she was surprised by the huge amount of activity in Scotland, and Banyard points out that new groups include the Belfast Feminist Network, Newcastle Feminist Book Group, Fawcett Essex group, and Cardiff Feminist Network. This last group was set up by Hannah Austin earlier this year – within a week, she says, there were around 300 members.
Suswati Basu, a 22-year-old who is currently studying Mandarin at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, embodies the movement's drive and excitement. She has been a feminist activist for four years now, in which time she has campaigned against student beauty pageants and been involved with the London Feminist Network's annual Reclaim the Night marches – large-scale protests against male violence, which started in the 1970s, died out in the 1990s, and were successfully revived in 2004. Basu has also taken part in protests with the activist group, Object, which many of the feminists I speak to describe as the most inspiring campaign around. Object has been challenging the sexual objectification of women since forming in 2003, and they scored their two biggest successes last year, securing changes in the laws surrounding lapdancing clubs and prostitution.
The young feminists who are spearheading this new activism clearly have enormous energy, ambition and idealism, and in many cases are doing brilliant work. But the question of where the movement goes next, of what its prime focus should be, remains to be answered.The current burst of feminist publishing is promising, but much of it repackages longstanding arguments. The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism is, as its title suggests, a lighthearted look at the topic; Reclaiming the F Word is a useful book for its expected audience - women discovering feminism for the first time - but doesn't set out to present unexpected new arguments. Dreamers of a New Day is a fascinating look at the women who were fighting for social justice in the late 19th and early 20th century, but its context is historical. Nina Power's book, One Dimensional Woman, lays claim to new ground but, at 20,000 words, is an opening gambit in a bigger battle.
There's a need for new thinking and more publishing then - as well as more focus.If, as Corwin suggests, the aim of today's activists is to completely change society, then questions remain about where to channel their energy. Should the focus be on getting more women into parliament? Getting more women out of prostitution? Does having more women at the top help all the women further down the ladder? Should activists focus on the sex industry, equal pay, violence against women, international issues – and if individuals and groups choose to tackle all of these, how much change can they achieve? If inequality between men and women is structural, a web of discrimination in which the dearth of women in politics intersects with the portrayal of women in pornography, which intersects with the tendency for women to be paid less than men, the depiction of women as obsessed with shoes, the likelihood that female plaintiffs will be disbelieved in rape cases, the attempts to undermine women's abortion rights; if the situation of women in Britain has an impact on women in France, the US, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, then which threads do we pull to make the most impact in bringing the whole web down?
"It feels as though there's so much interest," says Walter, "from so many different areas, that something positive has to happen, but whether it will, it's hard to know. "I'm heartened by the rise in activism," says Walter, "but the questions we'll all be asking ourselves over the next year are: how wide is this new wave? Will it touch people beyond the usual suspects? Will it galvanise energy more widely in the grassroots – bring in other classes, women of other backgrounds? And will it also touch women who have the power and influence to change things? I'm not saying that women aren't asking these questions. So it's not a criticism of what's going on, but it's the challenge. I feel that we're beginning to see more happening, but at the moment it's still quite focused in narrow areas. We need to see it spread".
Banyard is equally aware of the challenges. "At the moment, while feminist organising is growing and really exciting, it's quite disparate and unconnected," she says. UK Feminista is an attempt to address that issue. "For me, what's absolutely crucial," she continues, "is that we translate this excitement, this energy, into real gains for women's rights - because it's not an automatic translation. We need fundamental shifts in our culture, in our laws, in business practices. It's not a simple process. We're very much at the stage now of creating a mass base of people. What's crucial is that we then use that".
What's heartening is that feminism does seem to be reaching beyond the ivory towers of academe to a broad range of women. Redfern points out that there have recently been feminist articles in Elle and Company magazines, while Walter says she was surprised to see pieces debating the importance of feminism in The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph this year. Power says that, even just a year and a half ago, when she wrote One Dimensional Woman "the situation didn't seem remotely as optimistic, but so much has been happening, and there just seems to be a mainstream acceptance that feminism's still around, that it's not finished, it's not uncool, and it's not depressing. It suddenly has a contemporary sheen that makes it exciting, which wasn't really true in the 80s or 90s at all".
Shahida Choudhry, a 40-year-old mother, who lives in Birmingham and has worked in the domestic violence sector throughout her career, says that although a lot of her work "has been driven by feminism, it's only recently that I've started to frame it like that". In the past few years, she has been heavily involved with the Fawcett Society in Birmingham, and is also the founder of the locally based Women's Networking Hub, which brings grassroots women's organisations together with those who need their support. In January she held an event at a library in central Birmingham, "which I pulled together, on my own, in a couple of weeks". She was only expecting a handful of women "twenty at most, but three hundred turned up. It was mind blowing."
Choudry is also involved with the Million Women Rise marches – protests against violence against women – which have been taking place in London around International Women's Day for the past three years and are among the most successful of all the current feminist campaigns. An estimated 8,000 women turned out this year. "It was absolutely amazing," says Choudry, "the feeling of marching through the streets, shoulder to shoulder. It really shows that there are women who want to speak out".
UK Feminista summer school runs from 31 July to 1 August. For details, go to ukfeminista.org.uk
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